The present invention concerns a method of, and apparatus for printing high quality prints from photographic negatives.
Professional photographers in particular, and especially portrait and business photographers, need high quality prints. Such photographers usually show their customers optimal quality proofs to select from. To ensure customer satisfaction, the subsequent prints absolutely must have the same coloration and mean density as the first prints (proofs), even when improvements over these first prints are possible and may be desirable. Even when the light quantities employed for the first prints is determined by scanning and processing in the manner described in the German Patent No. 2,840,287 and its corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 4,279,502, and when the duplicate prints are printed on the same automatic equipment that produced the original prints submitted to the customer, slight displacements of the negative in relation to the scanner can lead to distortions in color balance. Professional photographers accordingly attempt to store the light quantities employed in producing the first prints in order to employ them again to produce subsequent prints. A method of this type is known from the German Patent Publication No. OS 4,031,022 and its corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 5,192,970.
A strip of material containing machine-readable addresses is attached to the negatives. Information representing optimal light quantities is stored in a memory along with the addresses. It can be assumed that customers will order their subsequent prints soon after seeing the first prints, and the light quantities will not need to be stored for much longer than three months. When the subsequent prints are to be made, the correct light quantities for each can be extracted from the memory by referring to the addresses on the data strip.
This method has certain drawbacks. The photographic negative strips must have data strips attached to them, which many customers do not like. It is impossible to ensure that the strips will still be attached when an order is to be processed. Attaching the strips to the negatives before the first printing process requires extra work. Similar methods may also be used with the address information applied to the back of the first prints (proofs). The problem in this case is that the proofs are not always returned with the negatives.